Medical images are frequently used for diagnostic purposes. To ensure a reliability of such diagnosis, the medical images are typically of high quality and subjected to little or no image manipulation. Nevertheless, there is a need for using medical images for illustration purposes rather than diagnostic purposes. For example, in a radiology report, a radiologist may report on a lesion which was detected based on the medical image, yet may wish to include a more illustrative view of the lesion in the radiology report.
For that purpose, a user, such as the radiologist or other clinician, may use a workstation or similar system to manually manipulate the medical image in order to obtain a suitable view of the lesion. This may involve the user selecting an image area for viewing by zooming and/or panning towards the lesion in the medical image. Optionally, the user may adjust viewing parameters such as window widthlevel to improve viewing conditions.
Having obtained a suitable view, the user may then request the workstation to generate an image of the current view, which may then be included in the radiology report. An image showing a selected area of the medical image is also referred to as a key-image. It is thus known to manually select an image area for generating a key-image.